Containers offer a number of advantages over traditional virtualization software, but easy visibility isn't one of them. Modern modular application architecture has, in fact, created a kind of "black hole" of complexity swarming with packages and dependencies developers can't readily sort out.

It's no surprise to see a growing number of container scanning products emerge to address this problem, but the latest entry into this market, JFrog's newly announced Xray, promises unprecedented visibility into the contents of software components, which the company calls "radical transparency."

JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim described his company's fourth major product release as a one-of-a-kind tool that will give organizations an unparalleled level of understanding about all their container images, software packages and binary artifacts.

"Xray will not only tell you that you have a security vulnerability or a licensing issue," he told ADTmag, "it will also provide you will a full graph of all dependencies. It tells you where you are exposed and how your Ops environment is suffering from this specific software package. You have the chance to zoom in and magnify a vulnerability, security, or license issue and put things on hold before blessing a production environment."

A fully automated platform, JFrog Xray comes with a REST API that supports integration and automation with an organization's continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, and allows other inspection and security tools to fit into the full build-to-production automated flow, Ben Haim said

It also includes notification technology from VersionEye, a Mannheim, Germany-based start-up that provides a system for tracking open source libraries and alerting developers in real time to security vulnerabilities, license violations and outdated dependencies. VersionEye technology monitors more than a million open source projects on a daily basis, said company founder and CEO, Robert Reiz, in a statement.

"Integrating the VersionEye technology with the JFrog platform creates an unparalleled capability for deep understanding of the quality and provenance of the software components organizations depend on," Reiz said.

The tool also integrates with other vulnerability and license compliance databases, such as Black Duck and WhiteSource.

Xray integrates tightly with JFrog's binary repository manager, Artifactory, which stores binary artifacts and the metadata that describes them in a defined directory structure. Artifactory was one of the first cloud-based binary repository managers. The company also makes Bintray, a distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) platform designed to give development organizations full control over how they store, publish, download, promote and distribute their software.

The software management and distribution tools provider unveiled Xray at its annual swampUP user conference, under way this week in Napa, Calif. The company also announced at the show the availability of Artifactory running as a SaaS application on the Google Cloud Platform, as well as a collaboration with Atlassian to integrate that company's Bitbucket cloud-based DVCS hosting service and the JFrog platform.

Much of the press around this year's Google I/O event focused on the company's day-one consumer app-economy announcements, but there was plenty of news for enterprise developers in the opening keynote.

The most immediately relevant announcement was the launch of Preview 1 of Android Studio 2.2. The upcoming version of the official IDE for Android app development includes a rewritten layout designer, an automated test recorder, a Firebase plug-in, and the latest updates of JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA and CLion development environments, on which the IDE is based.

The most welcome upgrade (judging from the applause the announcement received) is the new test recorder feature. Based on the Expresso testing framework provided by the Android Testing Support Library, the new tool allows devs to test an app manually while recording the interactions in Espresso code. That code can be played back across a number of platforms, including Google's Cloud Test Lab, to re-test the UI over and over again.

The new layout designer also drew its share of oohs and aahs from the crowd. Designing the UI for an Android app can be challenging, given the variety of screen sizes and resolutions the developer must accommodate. The rewritten designer calculates the screen positioning and sizing (constraints), which means the UIs can resize automatically for different screens.

Android Studio 2.2 also introduces support for the NDK-Build and Cmake build tools used for creating C++-based apps.

Versions of Android Studio 2.2 for Windows, Mac, and Linux can be downloaded now from the Canary Channel Page.

Google also announced that it will be adding features to its Firebase back-end-as-a-service product, which it acquired in 2014. The company plans to integrate Firebase fully with its existing products and services, and says that many previously paid-for features, such as Cloud Messaging, will be free going forward. The new Firebase is a single SDK that provides analytics, remote config, crash reporting, test lab, notifications, dynamic links, invites, AdWords and AdMobs. One notable new feature, Crash Reporting, provides reports to help diagnose and fix problems that show up in Android or iOS apps. The feature is based on Firebase Analytics, which allows developers to see information about how and where an app is being used.

The company also made several announcements around the third (and probably last) preview release of Android N. This version of the OS is shaping up to be very VR-centric, with support for the new Daydream system, announced at the show. The new OS will also support the advanced Vulkan graphics API, and and bring split-screen multitasking and picture-in-picture video playback. And there's a new JIT compiler designed to improve performance and take up less storage space.

The "N" in Android N is just a placeholder, of course, and Google has invited the public to help name the next version. ("Namey McNameface" has been disqualified as a potential option.) I'm guessing they'll be looking for something sweet, given the previous naming scheme. For what it's worth, I'd go retro with something like Abba-Zaba or Pop Rocks.

The Java EE Guardians this week unveiled a public draft of their charter, and it's worth reading for anyone interested in the future of enterprise Java. The charter makes and supports the argument that Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) continues to be essential to the long-term health of the Java ecosystem, and then it lays out compelling evidence that Oracle is "conspicuously neglecting Java EE."

A big chunk of that evidence comes from data analysis conducted independently by Josh Juneau, a Chicago-based app developer and author. (He wrote JavaServer Faces: Introduction by Example and Java EE 7 Recipes.) Earlier this year, Juneau began tracking "a decline in activity" around Java Specification Requests (JSRs) aimed at Java EE 8 for which Oracle maintains the lead.

"I had noticed activity declining late last year, but it wasn't until other members of the community pinged me in January to express serious concerns about a slowdown they were seeing that I really sat up and took a hard look," Juneau told me. "That's when I saw a clear drop in activity on these JSRs starting back in October. And then I started compiling the numbers."

Juneau chronicled his analysis in a long blog post that I highly recommend. He focused on JSR 372: JavaServer Faces 2.3; and JSR 368: Java Message Service 2.1. Juneau serves on the expert group for JSR 372 and JSR 378: Portlet 3.0 Bridge for JavaServer Faces 2.2. Many of the charts he included in that blog post to illustrate his findings appear in the Guardians' charter document.

"It seems as though Oracle may be shifting direction with their enterprise technology toward microservices and the cloud," Juneau said, "which is the way things are going nowadays. The problem with that strategy is that most of the ecosystem for the cloud, and even microservices, relies completely on Java EE technology. This really should be a concern to the Java developer community as a whole."

The Java EE Guardians, a group of volunteers committed to securing the continuing evolution of enterprise Java, formally announced their organization in March, though many of the group's members had been meeting for several months over concerns about Oracle's seeming lack of commitment to the upcoming Java EE 8 release.

Juneau has been a part of that conversation for some time, and he joined the Guardians to continue it at another level, he explained. "I guess my primary goal is to get a clear answer from Oracle about the future of Java," he said. "And if it turns out that Oracle isn't interested in helping to evolve those JSRs that are a part of Java EE 8, I'd like to explore the possibility of seeing those opened up so that the community and other organizations can take them over and move them forward, because they are so important to the entire ecosystem."

At least some of the heat that sparked the formation of the Guardians was generated when the head of Oracle's Java EE group, senior vice president Cameron Purdy, left last year amid rumors that Oracle was thinning its Java evangelist ranks. Other Java execs followed, including Reza Rahman, a former Oracle Java EE community evangelist who has been something of a driving force behind the Guardians.

I think it's worth noting that Juneau, Rahman, and all the Guardians I've spoken with to date give Oracle credit for being a good shepherd of Java over most of the past five years, and applaud the work of of the Oracle spec leads in general. (Juneau gave a shoutout in his blog post to the spec leads for JSR 372.) Their current concerns, they have said, arise from recent developments.

It's official: Jenkins 2.0 has arrived. Available today, this is the first major release of the open source continuous integration (CI) server in 10 years, and the excitement surrounding it is palpable. (Sorry, that was my Apple Watch telling me to stand up -- again.)

But seriously, this truly is an event. After 655 weekly releases, the once-controversial CI server has evolved into a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) system that provides a flexible way to model, orchestrate and visualize the entire software delivery pipeline.

"Pipeline" is the key word here -- or rather "pipeline-as-code." With this release comes the first officially supported implementation of a domain-specific language (DSL) for the coding of pipelines for continuous delivery. The new Pipeline plug-in is designed to help Jenkins users model their software delivery pipelines as code that can be checked in and version-controlled along with the rest of their project's source code.

"Probably one of the most important changes in this release is that Jenkins can now understand and model a delivery pipeline, natively, which it couldn't do before," Jenkins community leader Tyler Croy told me last week. "For me as a practitioner and Jenkins administrator, the out-of-the-box defaults we've changed in this release are also important, especially for new users. New users of Jenkins are going to find it much easier to get set up with the tools they need, and Jenkins will be more secure out of the box."

Croy is a Jenkins evangelist and community manager at CloudBees (the chief commercial supporter of Jenkins), which means he gets to work on Jenkins full time. He's been a leader in this community since before the fork from Hudson, so he's seen most of its evolution. He told me that, among other things, Jenkins 2.0 represents some fundamental rethinking at CloudBees -- and by Jenkins creator Kohsuke Kawaguchi -- about how the CI/CD server is going to be developed going forward.

"This was the first time we've had a parallel branch of development -- literally, on Git -- to work on big features," Croy told me. "Kohsuke has been a big proponent of the agile development concept and getting changes out to users as quickly as possible and getting feedback. But it's been hard to step outside that release process and think about bigger initiatives we could tackle to improve Jenkins over the next five to 10 years. Incorporating some of the UI changes and improving the getting-started setup to make the out-of-the-box experience better, for example, were things we developed over the past five or six months in parallel with the weekly release cycle. We have the ability now to experiment, try new things, and take on bigger initiatives that are challenging and time consuming in that separated little space of Jenkins development."

Storage plugability improvements are at the top of the community's to-do list, Croy said. No committers to anything yet, but this is the type of project that can now be accommodated by this parallel Jenkins development process for bigger releases.

Continuous integration has almost become a default in the standard software development stack, Croy observed, and continuous delivery is heading in that direction, too.

"There was a time when source control management wasn't part of the stack," he said. "Now it's standard to use Git or Subversion, and if you don't, people look at you like you're crazy. The same is true now for CI, and the direction the industry is moving tells me that CD is going to become standard part of that stack, too. People are saying, great, you can build and test your software, but how do you deliver it to your customers? It's just a matter of time before CD is standard in the stack, too."

"My personal goal," Croy added, "is to make Jenkins vastly more usable and much better documented and easier to adopt by 2016. This is something that we've started to do in Jenkins 2.0, and I plan to continue focusing on that comprehensive user experience."

A detailed overview of the Jenkins 2.0 release is available on the Jenkins Web site. And there's some great documentation ("Getting Started with Pipeline") online.

The big news in the evolving container ecosystem this past week was Mesosphere's announcement that it will be open sourcing its flagship Data Center Operating System, rebranded as DC/OS. (The company will also offer a commercial Enterprise version.) Among the long list of companies partnering with Mesosphere on DC/OS beta is a startup called Avi Networks, which got my attention at the Container World 2016 conference.

Started by former Cisco execs, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company emerged from stealth mode in December 2014 with the aim of delivering an application services platform fully implemented in software. The Avi Vantage Platform provides an alternative to legacy application delivery controllers (ADCs). It comprises the Avi Controller and distributed "elastic micro-ADCs" called Avi Service Engines, which are distributed across the environment to deliver services close to the applications. The platform's virtual engines perform Layer 4-7 functions (transport, session, presentation, application), which puts the company in competition with such established providers as F5 Networks, Citrix Systems, A10 Networks and Radware. Avi execs announced the integration of the Vantage Platform with Mesosphere's then-commercial-only DCOS at the Container World conference.

I had a chance to talk with Avi's CEO, Amit Pandey, about his company and its efforts to modernize application services. Pandey, who has been working around the Layer 4-7 space since 1998, said he has seen very little change in the architecture of the upper layers of the OSI model.

"It sits so close to the application that it's really surprising changes haven't happened," Pandey said, "because the fundamental way applications are build and deployed have changed dramatically. We've gone through a couple of generations of change, in fact. We had three-tier applications, then the onset of virtualization led to significant changes, especially in the way apps were deployed, and more recently we have microservices, which fundamentally changes the architecture and the tools for building and deploying applications. And through all this change, the ADC has just sort of chugged along. It's a very sleepy industry."

Avi's founders, Umesh Mahajan, Murali Basavaiah and Ranga Rajagopalan, decided to wake up that sleepy industry with an architecture that mimics a software-defined networking (SDN) architecture, Pandey said, resulting in what amounts to software-defined ADCs and load balancing. But the founders also recognized that, to accommodate things like microservices, containers, and public clouds, the architecture would have to be distributed, with a centralized control plane, and the ability to, essentially, learn about deployments and traffic patterns and bring that learning back in a kind of feedback loop to facilitate things like elastic scaleout, remediation against attacks, and/or giving developers the ability to troubleshoot microservices.

"In this brave new world of modern applications, we need the ability to control and manage highly distributed architectures; to manage multiple clouds; and to give analytics, visibility, and feedback for a high level of elasticity," Pandey said.

In a nutshell, Avi is providing appdev teams with a software-defined system that delivers discovery, security, and load balancing services elastically, with centralized control and monitoring. And Avi's layer of infrastructure is so application-like it can be put into a container and deployed almost anywhere. "Our customers often tell us that we are more like an application than infrastructure," Pandey said. And that's really what our vision of networking infrastructure is. It should be part of your app, because then the level of visibility and flexibility you have is phenomenal. Why should your network services be a distinct and inflexible hardware box when you can actually containerize it?"

To describe the 2.0 release of the Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server as long-awaited would be the understatement of the decade -- which is literally how long Jenkins has been a 1.0 release. Really. Ten years.

Technically, Jenkins has been around since it was forked from the Hudson CI back in 2011. Hudson was launched by Sun Microsystems in 2004. After Oracle acquired Sun, the company announced that it would be migrating the project to its java.net infrastructure and trademarking the Hudson name. The community objected to this move, voted to rename the project and moved the code to GitHub. Shortly thereafter, Oracle surprised the community by contributing the Hudson code, domain name and trademark to the Eclipse Foundation.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who created Hudson and instigated the Jenkins fork, became an elite developer and architect at CloudBees, and he's been a part of the community throughout the evolution of this technology. The open source, Java-based Jenkins CI server has been updated almost on a weekly basis for many years. Along the way, it has been evolving from a pure CI server to provide continuous delivery, as well.

"A lot of people still think of Jenkins as CI only," Labourey said. "But the teams have done a lot of work around Docker, pipeline support, usability -- so much work has happened in the last 12 to 18 months, in particular, that it's important to signal that this is not the good old Jenkins you knew five years ago."

CloudBees now refers to the Jenkins CI/CD server as an automation server, and many of the changes in version 2.0, the alpha build of which was recently released, reflects this evolving identity.

"People ask me, what is the competition for Jenkins," Labourey said. "The real competition for Jenkins is companies still doing everything manually. It's a tough culture to change."

Among other things, this release will bring the concept of "Pipeline as code" to Jenkins. The new Pipeline plug-in introduces a domain-specific language (DSL) designed to help Jenkins users model their software delivery pipelines as code, which can be checked in and version-controlled along with the rest of their project's source code. Users will be able to define simple and complex pipelines through the DSL and easily share pipelines among teams by story common "step" in shared repositories. (There's a great description with diagrams on the Web site.)

Jenkins 2.0 also comes with a buffed up setup and UI improvements. And Labourey emphasized that Jenkins 2.0 will be 100 percent backward-compatible with existing Jenkins installations.

"There will be no reason for people not to upgrade," he said.

CloudBees, which had been known since it was founded in 2010 primarily as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS, refocused on Jenkins in 2014. The company was an early supporter of the CI server and continues to be its leading commercial supporter.

Earlier this year the company rolled out the first-ever Jenkins-based CD-as-a-Service (CDaaS) platform. Last year the company combined its Jenkins Enterprise and Operations Center products into a single platform.

Details about the Jenkins 2.0 release are available now on the company Web site.

The list of Java evangelists exiting Oracle got a little longer this month when Reza Rahman announced that he would be leaving the company. But Rahman is not going quietly. In a personal blog post, he stated that he left because of his growing skepticism about Oracle's stewardship of enterprise Java, which he said was "independently shared by the ever vigilant Java EE community outside Oracle."

"As an evangelist, your entire existence depends on trust from the community," Rahman told me in an interview, "but I found I could not give the community straight answers about what Oracle is doing. In the end, I could not reconcile this."

And he couldn't leave it alone, either: Rahman and members of the community he served have joined forces to form the Java EE Guardians, a group of volunteers committed to supporting enterprise Java where they believe Oracle is falling down on the job.

The group has been meeting informally behind the scenes for a while, Rahman said, but is now formalizing the organization and going public with a Google Group (Java EE Guardians) and a Twitter handle (@javaee_guardian). It's still early days, but Rahman said to expect vision and mission statements, soon.

About 100 people have joined the Java EE Guardians as of this writing. The group's immediate plan is to assemble evidence to support their assertion that Java EE is, in fact, critical technology that needs more attention from Oracle. We can expect "complete metrics," Rahman said. Once that's established, they'll go on to substantiate their assertion that Oracles investment in server-side Java is not where it should be. They also intend to raise awareness of their concerns among Oracle's customers.

"Java EE is very much key to the overall server-side Java ecosystem, and maybe even the health of Java itself," Rahman said. "Without core investments from Oracle into Java EE, there's a very large part of the ecosystem that will be severely weakened. I simply do not believe that Oracle is doing enough with the Java EE specs, and I do not think they are fulfilling their commitment to the community. And I am very much not alone in this belief."

Ultimately, he said the group wants to secure the evolution of Java EE, and they're volunteering their own time to do it -- to "fill the resources gap" they perceive now to exist. They're even prepared take over some Java Specification Requests (JSRs), Rahman said.

"The reality is, the Java EE community is the most vocal and the most passionate, and yet they are the people Oracle is not leveling with today," Rahman said. "It's a huge problem."

Rahman was an independent consultant before joining Oracle, and he's gone back to that work with CapTech Consulting. He has served on the Java EE, EJB, and JMS expert groups for the JCP. He implemented the EJB container for the Resin open source Java EE application server. And he co-wrote EJB 3 in Action (with Debu Panda and Derek Lane). To say that he's passionate about Java EE would be an understatement.

He saw the writing on the wall at Oracle, he said, when the head of company's Java EE group, senior vice president Cameron Purdy, left last year amid rumors that Oracle was thinning its Java evangelist ranks. Rahman described Purdy in his personal blog as "a gem in the executive ranks of our industry," and one of the reasons he signed on to evangelize Java EE at Oracle.

Rahman says the greatest challenge the Java EE Guardians face is getting Oracle to accept their work, to essentially acknowledge that there is a problem. "The bottom line is, if Oracle is not committed to server-side Java and not committed to supporting the EE space, then fundamentally, someone else needs to step in."

I contacted Oracle for comment, but the company had not gotten back to me at press time.

You know how I'm always banging on about how we need a technology-agnostic conference focused on the challenges facing the makers and maintainers of the purpose-designed software that drives organizations in virtually every industry in the world -- in other words, the readers of Application Development Trends? Well, it turns out, the organizers of the enormously popular Live! 360 conference agree with me. (Or maybe they just got tired of the noise.)

App Dev Trends 2016 is the newest addition to the Live! 360 Orlando conference, scheduled for Dec. 5-9. This multi-conference combines several co-located events, including Visual Studio Live, SQL Server Live!, Office/SharePoint Live!, Modern Apps Live! and TechMentor. Live! 360 always attracts a big crowd of attendees ranging from down-in-the-trenches developers to team leaders and decision-makers at just about every level.

We're organizing App Dev Trends 2016 to add another dimension to the larger conference. We want to throw a spotlight on the unique challenges faced by enterprise software professionals, whatever their preferred platforms. Our event is about cutting-edge intelligence on a wide range of trends, tools and best practices that our readers need to keep up with the ever-evolving demands of their organizations. It's about knowing what's next and preparing for it; acquiring new skills and adapting existing skill sets; and boosting organizational efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness. It's also about rubbing elbows with peers and pros facing the same challenges.

Earlier this week we issued the official App Dev Trends 2016 Call for Presentations (CFP). We are currently looking for presenters on the following topics:

Agile: Real World Practices in the Enterprise

Cloud Application Development

Big Data Analytics

Mobility in the Enterprise

DevOps: Changing Roles

Internet-of-Things at Enterprise Scale

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality

Java 8: Lambdas

Java 9: Jigsaw

Functional Programming

JVM Languages

Micro-architectures

Containerization

The Web site for submitting presentation proposals is up and running now, and the deadline for submissions is April 1, 2016.

The conference is a ways off, but that CFP submission deadline is just around the corner, so please send us your proposals soon. We're expecting a lot them, and I'm looking forward to reading every one. (Did I mention that I'm the Conference Chair?)

There are few trickier tasks in business -- any business -- than changing a company's name. There are branding issues, legal complications, marketing considerations. Just ask the folks at Lightbend, formerly Typesafe, who have been going through the process for months, and today announced its new moniker.

"It was an interesting process," the company's president and CEO, Mark Brewer, told me. "But I wouldn't want to go through it again."

Why change what many considered to be a pretty cool name?

"We've broadened our product portfolio so much that we felt we needed a name change so that the market would recognize us for more than just Scala," Brewer said. "The Scala community continues to grow and adoption continues at an accelerating rate, but we, as a company, are about more than that. We are about providing enterprise developers with a platform for building this next generation of apps on the JVM. The Reactive Platform, from its inception, has supported both Scala and Java."

More than half the company's current customer based is Java developers, Brewer said. And virtually every new Lightbend customer starts out using Java.

The original name, "Typesafe," comes from the concept of type safety, the property of some languages that prevents unwanted behavior caused by discrepancies among differing data types. Scala is a type-safe language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so the name made sense when the organization was new and focused on Scala. But the company evolved. It's now the force behind Akka, an open source, asynchronous, event-driven middleware implemented in Scala; the Play Web app framework, which is written in Scala and Java; and the open source Apache Spark Big Data processing framework, among other products. And today the company announced a new framework for Java developers creating microservices.

The company's Reactive Platform combines a number of its products to support the development of reactive applications on the JVM in both Scala and Java. Conceptualized in the "Reactive Manifesto," which was co-authored by CTO and co-founder Jonas Bonér, reactive applications are apps that better meet the "contemporary challenges of software development," in a world in which applications are deployed to everything from mobile devices to cloud-based clusters running thousands of multicore processors.

So there was a reasonable argument for the name change. I also understand that the old name was frequently misspelled (Typeface, Typespace and so on), which must have been frustrating. (I never misspelled it myself. Just sayin'.)

Typesafe enlisted Lexicon Branding, a branding firm with a good rep in open source circles, to help with the process, Brewer said. The company also included its customers and the Scala community in the name-change process, starting last May, seeking feedback and suggestions via the Typesafe blog. Judging from the initial comments, many weren't immediately on board, but they seem to have embraced the idea eventually.

Why Lightbend?

"The name was intended to evoke a sense of something interesting and cool and next-gen, but nothing specific to any technology," Brewer said. "It's also easy to spell and easy to remember."

BTW: Brewer has gone through this process twice before: once for the change from Interface 21 to SpringSource. That was a good move, and I think this will prove to be a good move, too, once we all get used to it.